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GOSSIPS

What do Stray Cats, The Meteors, Nick Cave and Peter Punk, a fiction character published in a Spanish comic, have in common?

Let’s go there…

Gossips was a club that was located at number 69 on Dean Street in London. The building, located in Soho, consists of two floors and each of them housed different clubs throughout the week.
Gary Mayal, son of the bluesman John Mayall opened what is known as one of the most durable clubs in the London scene, the Gaz´s Rockin Blues. Gary asked Stray Cats to play at the club’s opening on July 3, 1980.

However, this club that on Thursdays scheduled concerts and sessions where different music styles were played, like ska, reagge, rythm & blues, r & r or punk and also brought together the first hordes of “The Crazies” or “the Zorchmen” that are not other than the followers of The Meteors and the first psychobillies that were seen in the city and who came to see this new group long before The Klub Foot (the venue where the psychobilly took shape and developed and housed the golden age of the movement) opened its doors.


In 1982 another mythical club opens its doors at 69 Dean Street is about the Batcave and, as the name implies, it brought together the gothic subculture of those years: Aliex Sex Fiend, Bauhaus, Sex Gang Children and The Meteors.
A coffin with the door open received the clients and among its regulars were Robert Smith, Siouxie Sioux, Nick Cave or Marc Almond and, even, Michael Fagan, who starred in 1982 a series of scandals for his incursions into Buckingham Palace, and he would come to sing the national anthem during an ethyl night in the lounge.

During a night in The Batcave, Lydia Lunch proposed to start a band to Marck Almond, Nick Fiend (Alien Sex Fiend) and to Nick Cave. The band would be called The Immaculate Consumptive and, although Fiend was eventually replaced by J. G. Thirlwell, it only existed for three days in November 1983 and gave 3 gigs in New York and Washington.

And the last connection also took place in the Batcave. In the story that the Spanish cartoonist Max recreates in Peter Pank (an adult parody of Peter Pan, fiction character from the J. M. Barrie’s most famous work “Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” and closer to Disney ‘version in the key of Youth Subculture in the 80s, among rockers, punks and skinheads mainly), specifically in the second part called Licantropunk, the main character goes to an appointment in The Batcave, where his contact, a sensual Gothic girl, awaits him before starting a train trip to Scotland in the company of the “Scott Skins” (Fiction characters). This story was published for first time in the famous Spanish comic “El Víbora” in 1984.

Although the “official” version is that on July 11 Stray Cats give their first concert opening for The Fabulous Poudless at the London’s Music Machine, the gig at Gaz’s Rockin Blues (Gossip) was quite possibly the first of the trio in London.

THE STRAY CATS STORY is the first band’s biography published in the world and include unpublished photographs of this concert, its author PAUL ROUNDHILL has given us some pictures of that historic concert.

The Stray Cats Story English version will be available coming soon in this web

 


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